How to carbonate craft beer with honey? Priming with honey.

How to carbonate my craft beer with honey? How much honey? The answer to these questions is a simple rule of three.

Example given: Imagine that we are brewing 20 liters of beer and we are following a recipe that tell us about a a priming with 6.5 grams of sugar per liter. As we like to try new things we have decided to prime with honey, then the question arises: What is the amount of honey I should use? What we are going to do is to read the honey label and look for the amount of sugar per 100 grams; the usual is 85-88 grams of sugar per 100 grams of honey. We make the rule of three and we have the optimal amount of honey that we should use.

If you have 20 liters of beer an a recomendation of 6.5 grams of sugar per liter, you should use 130 grams of sugar.

100 grams of honey contains 88 grams of sugar, so 130 grams of sugar are 147 grams of honey.

We prime with honey straight to the bottle and not in the fermenter, because we also like to use various types of honey: rosemary honey, flowers, avocado… any honey you can get will work fine. For a bottle of 33 cl. a teaspoon is fine and three would be a lot, it should come out in an over-carbonated beer with excess of head foam. However the exact amount is given by the experience.